About the Refugee Crisis

The news coverage of the largely-Middle Eastern refugee crisis unfolding in Europe has brought shocking images into our homes and many want to help. The unsettling reality of this situation is that most of the refugees, primarily Syrian and Iraqi, have not made it out of the Middle East. They have become the humanitarian burden of nearby countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt.

The situation is compounded when you consider those who have left their homes and have settled in other areas of their homeland (called internally displaced persons or IDPs). By all accounts, there are 3.5 million internally displaced persons in Iraq and 7.6 million IDPs in Syria.

As a result, The Outreach Foundation has chosen to focus our efforts on finding resources for our church partners in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan to care for neighbors---Christian, Muslim and Yazidis---who have had to flee to a safer area in their own country or find a haven across a nearby border.

Over the past three and half years, Outreach has put well over a million dollars into the hands of our partners (largely, the Presbyterian Church in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq). Those dollars have built bread bakeries and sunk a well in Yazidi camps, repaired houses so that Presbyterian families could move back into re-secured cities, provided heating oil to get through long cold winters, allowed for food and medicine to sustain fragile populations and given sustaining resources for hundreds of families driven out of their villages by ISIS.

In all these places and through all these efforts, Christ is glorified and his name made known. The Church there is a bright light in darkness and a Word of Hope in the swirl of despair. We hear Paul’s words “do not grow weary in well doing”. We invite you to continue with us on this journey of accompaniment.